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CCGaDay Day 16: Game I wish I owned

Submitted by Allen on Tue, 09/16/2014 - 00:00

I have a habit of trying out games, and I like to keep enough to have two decks, more or less. That way, even years in the future I can at least play a game, even if I don't have full collections. And for the most part, I've managed to keep a couple hundred cards for each game. The exact amount depends on how much I liked the game.

Yes, you heard me right - AvP was designed to be played three players, three factions. (Go figure that it's from Precedence). And similar to Netrunner, each faction had a different style of play. And similar to Trek or Wars, it was built around a battlefield of cards, where each faction was trying to meet it's victory conditions.

The Marines/Humans were the most obvious - you had a squad of four Marines, they equipped guns and widgetry, and they tried to search for and rescue Civilians. Aliens were the swarmers - weak individually, but powerful in groups, and they were trying to find Civilians as well to infest, which created additional Aliens for you to use. On the other extreme were the Predators - only a single character in play, but you were an utter combat monster. Predators wanted to capture prey, and while civilians were quick and easy, the real value was in taking out Aliens and Marines.

Adding to this was that the game board was made of locations, and while you could move from one to another in the expected way, you could also move between two locations with the same name. This meant it was entirely possible to suddenly discover that aliens were coming from multiple angles they couldn't a second ago.

Now, the game definitely had some weaknesses. Scenarios could be very hit-and-miss quality wise. Marines had a card combination that ended up being a massive Alien hoser. And later sets would further mess up the balance by adding factions and groups of Predators and generally mucking with things.

But I loved the idea of Predators, with all their awesome tricks. (And I'm reminded that they also had the very cool idea of their win condition being dependant on their loadout - the more and fancier the toys you outfitted, the more people you would have to capture to win. So you could load for bear and just plan to wipe the table, or you could go light and try for a quick and stealthy win.

Anyway. I have a decent amount of Predator kit, but I'm fairly light on everything else, and I've always wished I had a bit more...